


Nuances of Blue

by orphan_account



Series: Six Degrees (More or Less) [3]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 07:31:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1596674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Half-brothers Lukas and Eirikur moved to Copenhagen with Lukas’ friend Mathias after their parents washed up on the beach dead. Lukas tries valiantly to be a good parent while he’s working long shifts as a trauma nurse, but inevitably, mistakes are made and isolation is perpetuated. Eirikur, a secondary school student and violinist, joins Leon Zhao and Tien Nguyen on a film project, and finds a few other things along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nuances of Blue

Eirikur remembers clearly. Lukas tells him to forget, sadly. Tiredly. He is a trauma nurse, works long shifts at night. There are not many violent crimes in Copenhagen, so it is nothing like working in Moscow or Bogota or Chicago, but there are plenty of drunkards. Always plenty, and people do stupid things when under the influence. Eirikur remembers his parents going out to sea. They went out to sea every day. They were fishermen, small scale, in a rural area. Then one day his parents didn’t come home. The bodies washed up a few days later, but Eirikur didn’t see them. Lukas and Mathias had spared him from that, and a few weeks later the three of them had moved to Copenhagen. The city of beautiful towers.

\--------------------------

“I have a night shift today, Erik, and I think Mathias’s flight isn’t coming in until 9. Do you think you can get yourself home?” Lukas asks. He’s the only one to call him that.

“Of course,” Eirikur replies, and snaps his phone closed.

\--------------------------

“I can’t pick you up today, is there a bus you can take?” His voice sounds thready and upset.

“I’ll walk.”

\--------------------------

“My boss isn’t letting me leave until this surgery is done. I don’t think we have any food, see if the neighbours have some bread.”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

“You too,” Eirikur replies absently.

\--------------------------

It gets bad. For a few months, there aren’t any clean dishes. Eirikur doesn’t have any laundry, because their machine stopped working and he doesn’t have any quarters to pay for a cycle in the local neighbourhood one. Mathias can’t find a law firm to work at. Lukas is barely home as he works 36-hour shifts, he doesn’t sleep, and all of them try so hard for so little reward.

\--------------------------

It gets better. They find an apartment with a lower rent. Lukas gets a meagre pay raise and Mathias gets a job as a hospital lawyer. Like clockwork, they pay their rent and utilities. Eirikur buys a bicycle; he figures he might as well make use of the biker-friendly spaces in the city. Little by little, they figure something out.

\--------------------------

Eirikur knows that it’s weird; he lives with his half-brother, a half-brother who hadn’t even known he’d existed until he was nearly twenty, and his half brother’s boyfriend. He never knows what to bubble in on school forms or how to explain his family situation in language courses.

\--------------------------

Lukas misses their parents more than Eirikur does, which is strange because Lukas had barely met them when they died. Eirikur remembers their laughs and them cooking dinner together, but their faces have become obscured by hazy passage of time and forgetful memories. It wasn't so long ago, but he never cries about them. He thinks he did at their funeral, and when they were missing somewhere out in the storm. Lukas had been a wreck. His hands had been shaking so much that he hadn’t been able to light a fire in the hearth. Mathias had come over a few hours after they got the news of the boat’s disappearance, and held Lukas in his arms for a long time. Sometimes he still finds Lukas in the bathroom with his face in his hands. There’s no such thing as a silent cry in Eirikur’s experience. Even when everything was terrible and they were alone together with no backup-plans and too much on their plates, Lukas never left him alone to cry.

\--------------------------

“Don’t you have a lab to do?” Lukas asks.

“That was last week.”

“You have a paper though. On Arab Spring.”

“I turned that in yesterday,” Eirikur replies, not without a bit of exasperation.

“Geo quiz today?” Mathias asks haphazardly, and he’s right on mark. Lukas narrows his eyes at him.

“I don’t think he likes it when you try to upstage his parenting skills,” Eirikur notes sleepily as he pours coffee down his throat.

“Considering I am not a parent-“

Mathias doesn’t even let him finish the sentence. “We are so.”

“Don’t say stupid things like that,” Lukas mutters.

“The law disagrees with you, and I do too. You’re more of a father than yours ever was-” Eirikur knows that Mathias is referring to the father that took Lukas away from his mother when she was just a baby, and left no forwarding address.

“Shut up,” Lukas snaps angrily.

\--------------------------

Despite Lukas and Mathias’s best efforts, Eirikur sometimes feels alone. He feels alone right now, on a bike in a terrible rainstorm. The helmet does little to shield him from the rain, and his jacket is buttoned up to his chin. He locks up his bike with all the others in the front of the school, and shoves his hands deep inside his pockets.

“Are you ready for the quiz?” Anri asks him, matching her pace with his as they walk into the school. She’s a year older than he is, but they are in the same geography class because she failed it last year.

“As I’ll ever be,” he says, and suspiciously eyes the plastic bowl of some sort of pastry, drenched in syrup and what looks like whip topping, that she’s shovelling into her mouth.

“What’s the capital of Albania?”

“Tirana,” he answers.

“Want some?” she inquires, gesturing towards the bowl with the plastic fork.

“No thanks. What is that?”

“Strawberry shortcake.”

“Not really a breakfast food,” he remarks as they walk into the school, stamping their rain boots on the rug and stripping off their jackets so they can shake them off in the entryway.

“Who’s in your Scandinavian history class?” Anri asks him as they trudge to the west wing of the school.

“I dunno. Why?” 

“You’ll see,” she says, eye glittering with excitement as she stops outside her math classroom. Eirikur blinks and walks to Scandinavian history.

\--------------------------

Fru Laursen writes “Scandinavian Movie Project” on the dry erase board at the front of the class. She’s a petite brunette woman, but she has a huge, bellowing voice that seems to rumble straight from her diaphragm.

“Can we pick our own groups?” a girl named Lisa asks quickly from the back of the class.

“Of course. Unless there are any problems, and then I’ll assign them,” she informs them squarely, her expression making it clear she wasn’t going to tolerate any mean-spirited exclusion or the like.

The people sitting on either side of him are both pretty quiet, and since neither of them making jolting immediate movements to link arms with their friends like some other members of the class, Eirikur decides it’s a safe bet to ask them. He musters up his courage, and inquires, “Would you all like to be in a group with me?”

“What’s your name?” the girl on the right of him asks.

“Eirikur Olvirsson. You?”

“Tien Nguyen.” The girl extends her hand confidently, and Eirikur shakes somewhat uncertainly.

“I’m Leon Zhao, nice to meet you and such,” the boy replies casually, and he's taken aback. Eirikur has heard about this kid before. He’s the rising star of the Model UN club, he gavels in nearly every conference, and he is renowned for his smooth, consistent arguments and hard-hitting debating. Eirikur doesn’t know what he was expecting, but this wasn’t it.

Fru Laursen claps her hands to get the class’s attention. “I’m passing out a rubric. Read the points carefully.” Eirikur glances over the directions, informing them to pick a piece of Scandinavian history and make a fictional interpretation inspired by it.

“We could do the Vikings,” Eirikur suggests half-heartedly.

“No,” Tien says, shaking her head firmly. “Everyone will do that.”

The trio sits in silence for a few moments, before Leon takes charge.

He rips a piece of lined paper out of his notebook. “First, let’s establish a general time period. Then we can discuss which country it should be from, and we will narrow it down from there.”

“Nothing ancient,” Tien suggests. “I would suggest post-1800.”

Eirikur tries to remember the stories his half-brother, twelve years older than him, told him about living in Larvik and the historical events he heard about. A few important occurrences come to mind. The 2011 Attacks would be too emotional and tragic to even attempt, and the discovery of Norwegian oil in the 60s or the Icelandic financial crisis would be too boring. “Heavy water sabotage,” Eirikur blurts out. The idea came to him suddenly.

Leon tilts his head in consideration. “In World War II? That could work; my cousins have a boat we could use for filming.”

Tien straightens her ponytail seriously. “What should our plot be? I want to film, so that leaves mainly you two as actors.”

Leon rubs his pencil in between his hands thoughtfully. “How about Eirikur and I are both saboteurs in charge of sinking a ship carrying heavy water, and then a storm washes us ashore so we have to try to get back to the ship and blow it up before it’s too late?”

It’s a good idea, but Eirikur decides he does not at all sound like the Model UN public speaking prodigy everyone makes him out to be.

\--------------------------

“I’m doing a movie project on Norwegian heavy water sabotage,” Eirikur informs Lukas over dinner, a hurried potato dish (slightly burned) on one of his elder brother’s rare free evenings.

“Really?” he inquires, taking a bite of the rather burned potato.

“We were wondering if you could help us with some Norwegian translations,” Eirikur asks. Lukas grew up in Norway, next-door-neighbours with Berwald, Tino, and Mathias, and to this day his Danish can be a bit shaky at times.

Before Lukas can reply, Mathias jumps in. “My Norwegian is pretty top-notch, I don’t think anyone could argue with that.”

Lukas rolls his eyes and turns to Mathias, who’s grinning a little. “I’m not going to even justify that with a response.” He twists in his seat to Eirikur. “Sure. Who’s in your group?”

“This kid named Leon Zhao, and a girl named Tien Nguyen. I don’t know either of them very well.” 

“Huh.” 

“Anri said she’d help too if we needed a German-looking person.”

“Mm.”

“I thought you would have more to say about it, didn’t you do a huge project on the heavy water sabotage in college?” Eirikur prompts.

“I’m sorry Erik; I’m exhausted. If you want to see the report, I think I might still have it. It’s in the storage closet, in one of the smaller boxes.”

“I’ll help,” Mathias volunteers.

“You just want an excuse to go through my things,” Lukas accuses, and then yawns halfway through and immediately the sarcastic bite from his words is gone. He puts his head on the table exhaustedly, elbows splayed out on either side of him.

“Guilty as charged,” Mathias replies, and kisses Lukas’s head before rushing with Eirikur to the storage closet.

\--------------------------

It’s a rainy Saturday, and Eirikur clearly has nothing better to do but sift through their storage closet, mostly populated with linens and extra washcloths. He watches as Mathias opens the packing tape on ones of the small packages with a box cutter, and throws the flaps open, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He finds the report well enough. It’s in a stack of selected college and secondary school mementos. Eirikur finds it odd that Lukas even has this stuff; he’s the type of person to throw away something as soon as it’s no longer immediately useful. There are even a few photographs.

“If Lukas weren’t so tired there’s no way he would have let you in here,” Eirikur points out.

“Maybe he just trusts me,” he replies, placing his hand to his chest in mock hurt. “I can’t believe he kept these,” Mathias says. There’s no mistaking the reminisce in his voice. There’s grainy one with Lukas, Mathias, Tino, and Berwald sitting on a dock with no shoes and their trousers rolled up to their knees. They can’t be more than twelve. There’s even some from Lukas as a teenager, standing with various combinations of his friends.

“Wow, look, he’s smiling in this photo. I forgot we even had these,” Mathias says nostalgically, holding up one of him and Lukas standing in front of a tan brick house with their arms locked around each other. And Lukas is smiling. He’s grinning, a full-on toothy smile as he looks sideways at Mathias as the latter kisses his cheek and holds him tightly. Eirikur isn’t shocked, of course, but he is surprised, and he closes the box back up. He's not going to mention finding this to Lukas. “Don’t tell your brother,” he says jokingly as he carefully picks up the photo and slides it into his wallet.

\--------------------------

Leon, Tien, and Eirikur write their script over the course of several Skype conferences. Eirikur likes his character well enough. He is Eyal Blumenkrantz, a Norwegian-Jewish navigator and an expert in boating. Leon is a Norwegian member of the resistance movement named Kjetil Norgaard, special ops. Tien, to her credit, knows what she’s doing with a camera. The play is intended to be about 20 minutes long. “Quality over quality” Eirikur remembers Fru Laursen chiding. “Besides, who wants to sit through a six-hour long movie? Not me, that’s for sure.”

\--------------------------

EYAL: The weather is terrible, are you sure you will be able to ski through this?

KJETIL: I can ski through anything. Are you sure you will be able to navigate through this?

EYAL: Of course.

KJETIL: Then we have an understanding.

\--------------------------

“My uncle and aunt said that we could use their boat, as long as we didn’t damage it,” Leon informs Eirikur as he calls him early in the morning, as he and Anri are walking to school.

“I’m five minutes away from school, you could have told me in class.”

“I was bored, and your voice is nice,” Leon says bluntly.

Eirikur turns the colour of borscht, bright magenta splotched with the starch white of his skin, or hardboiled egg.

“What’d he say?!” Anri asks excitedly. He hushes her and smacks away her attempt to take his mobile phone away, no doubt to say something embarrassing to Leon.

“Thanks. I work really hard on it,” he finally musters, a bit awkwardly.

Leon laughs. “Later.”

\--------------------------

“Māma, wǒ xiǎng qù wǒ de péngyǒu jiā. Hǎo bù hǎo?” There is a long stretch of quick conversation where Eirikur is completely lost, until he hears Fru Zhao, presumably, shout into the receiver, “Xiǎo Xīn!” Clearly exasperated, Leon hangs up his phone.

“I thought you spoke Cantonese,” Tien notes.

He looks surprised. “I do. My mom doesn’t. She’s from the mainland.”

“All right, let’s go,” Leon says quickly, clearly eager to change the subject.

They have plans to finish and finalise the script and storyboard this afternoon, with hopes of starting official filming the very next day. It’s a very simple story, as they intended. Eyal Blumenkrantz and Kjetil Norgaard will work together as a core vanguard of the group, with the latter handling the skiing and the former in charge of navigation and boating. Then a storm interrupts their plans, and their boat topples and they’re forced to swim to shore. After recovering the boat, they manage to make it into the ship, just barely inside the time frame, when a supposedly German soldier stumbles upon them setting up the bombs. The German soldier, played by Anri with a wig and a lowered voice, initially threatens to reveal their plans as they steal into the engine room, but then reveals himself as a supporter of the Norwegian resistance, as he is a Norwegian himself.

GERMAN SOLDIER: I won’t sound the alarm, go, go, go!

EYAL: _[working quickly with wires]_ Your crew will die here.

GERMAN SOLDIER: Those scum deserve to die for what they have done to my country.

Tien’s mum is much like her daughter. She asks hard questions and makes very clear her opinions regarding anything she doesn’t approve of. But she seems a kind woman; she makes them Bánh bao, which Eirikur appreciates since he didn’t eat lunch.

“What is the message of this film?” Fru Nguyen asks them critically, but she smiles slightly when they present her with an acceptable answer.

“We’re trying to present a historical topic in an accessible way, for our classmates. Since different groups are doing all different topics in Scandanavian history, the idea is that we’ll learn something new about our region’s history and culture, ” Leon had said. There are those public speaking skills Eirikur hadn’t been sure were even there. Leon holds himself differently and speaks in a different tone, almost like he is in a different mode just to impress his peers and superiors. _No wonder he wins so many awards,_ Eirikur considers.

“Tien, thank your friends for coming over. Your father will be home soon,” Fru Nguyen, which is a polite way of informing Leon and Eirikur that they’ve overstayed their welcome.

“Thank you very much, Bà Nguyen,” Leon says on their exit, and Eirikur can physically see the newfound approval in her eyes. “Thanks,” Eirikur adds, and Fru Nguyen shuts the door.

“Do you know Vietnamese?” he asks Leon. He laughs lightly.

“Nope, I looked that up on my phone,” he answers.

“Seriously? Why?” he replies incredulously.

“Well, she likes me now, doesn’t she?” Leon inquires, and Eirikur is stunned into silence. He never thinks that hard about impressing anyone, let alone a random classmate’s mother that he will likely never interact with after the project is completed.

“You think I’m being fake,” Leon sighs.

“No! No, I don’t think that at all,” Eirikur hastily corrects any misunderstanding that may have occurred between them.

“Why not? Everyone else does,” he replies tiredly as they walk to the bus stop.

“I don’t think it’s fake as long as you’re acting out of a genuine desire to make people happy,” Eirikur says quietly. He can’t believe he just said that; he _never_ says things like that to people in general, even ones he knows very well.

“You’re sweet,” Leon says absently as he gets on the bus and Eirikur gets on his bike and straps on his helmet. Light pink dusts his cheek as he goes home.

\--------------------------

“Did you and Leon and Tien finish the script?” Mathias asks as chops carrots, still in his cooperate law attire. Lukas isn’t home and he won’t be back for another hour, at best.

“We did,” Eirikur replies. “I think it turned out well.”

“I could check over it if you want.”

“You’re not an editor,” Eirikur points out, not unkindly. He’s known Mathias just as long as he’s known Lukas.

“No, but I am a lawyer, and trust me, we read a shit-ton of paperwork. I learned how to grammar,” he replies, an easy grin spreading across his face.

“I guess so,” he says, turning around to dig into his backpack for a few moments before finding the stapled packet, scratched up a little with blue pen, and handing it to Mathias, who begins to flip through it, scanning the pages quickly.

“Woah, you’re acting this out on a boat?” Mathias asks.

“Yeah, why do you ask?” is his somewhat detached answer as he tries to avoid overcooking or undercooking the noodles.

“Does Lukas know about this?” he asks seriously, and Eirikur sees immediately where he is going with this, although it hadn’t occurred to him before.

“I might not have mentioned it,” Eirikur says, drawing out his syllables rather unhappily. If Lukas put the kibosh on this now, his group will hate him. And their project will suck. How can they pretend to blow up a boat without a boat?

“Shit, Eirikur, you need to talk to him.”

“What do you think he’ll do?”

Mathias scratches the top of his head. “I’m not going to speak for him, you’ll have to ask him.”

“Can you not tell him?” Eirikur pleads as he turns off the stove and pours the pasta into the colander resting in the sink. Eirikur has known Mathias approximately since he first met Lukas, and he can count the times he’s seen him dead serious on one hand. Now he’ll need two, because unfortunately he’s not kidding around.

“You can tell him, and sort this out among yourselves. Or I can tell him, and I can get in the middle of a conflict I shouldn’t be involved in and make everything worse.” Eirikur groans, and feels, for a moment, unbelievably frustrated with Lukas. He can already hear him shaking his head, telling him it’s not safe to be out on the water, bringing up the death of their parents for the tenth time. He huffs in annoyance.

“I’ll tell him,” Eirikur says finally, although in reality his intentions are a bit different. Should he dare trying to trick Mathias into thinking he’s already informed Lukas? It’s not like they see much of each other during the week… Yes, he decides, he’ll have to try. For the sake of the project.

\--------------------------

Lying to Lukas and Mathias feels a bit odd, but it’s not like he tells them everything about his life in the first place.

“Tien says she’s got her camera equipment and she’s about to board the bus,” Leon relates from his mobile phone. “All right, bye Tien.” Shutting his phone, he turns back to Eirikur. “You’re not going to ride your bicycle?” he asks jokingly.

“That’d be quite a trek, with a lot of gear,” Eirikur remarks as they board the bus, gesturing towards his prop bag. It’s nothing compared to what Leon’s got though- full out skiis and boots, in a bag currently swinging by his side. Taking seats next to one another, they pull out their scripts (both of them are nervous) and begin to read over the parts that they are most uncertain about. Copenhagen may be the city of beautiful towers, but there aren’t any towers where they are heading. Just farmland and rocky hills.

\--------------------------

“Want to listen to music?” 

“I didn’t bring an iPod,” Eirikur replies. They’re about halfway to their destination- Leon’s cousins live full within the bureaus of nowhereville, Denmark.

“Here,” Leon replies, handing him one of his ear buds.

\--------------------------

There are four inches of snow on the ground when they get there. It was a nearly three-hour bus ride, and Eirikur has hardly ever seen this much snow in Copenhagen. Immediately he sets upon getting himself all set- first, he takes refuge in a thick area of the forest to change his jeans for water-resistant trousers and his cotton shirt for one of a similar material as the trousers. Additionally, he slides on a jacket, buttons it up to his neck, and pulls on a knit hat and gloves.

“All ready?”

“Yep,” Eirikur answers.

“We can start with the Act I Scene II, that’ll be the easiest to shoot,” Tien decides, cradling her camera in one gloved hands and gesturing to the nearby dock with the other.

“Will the wind be a problem for the audio?” Leon asks.

“Not if you talk loudly enough.”

\--------------------------

EYAL: You have to trust me. We need to go this way.

KJETIL: Your compass must be wrong.

EYAL: I have been navigating on boats for years.

KJETIL: What if you’re wrong? Our team can’t go in blind, it would be too dangerous. Our success as the vanguard is crucial to the destruction of the stolen heavy water.

EYAL: We wager everything to save our countries, and you are worried about putting your trust in me?

KJETIL: [silence for a few seconds] All right.

\--------------------------

They film for hours upon end but according to Tien, have only finished 1/3 of the movie. When they are nearing the end and everyone is hungry and tired, the fight between Eyal and Kjetil feels pretty real, almost as if they are really insulting each other. Tien tells them that they put some nice raw emotion in it, and neither Leon nor Eirikur plan to tell her that the frustration they are feeling collectively wasn’t rehearsed or mimed.

“What do you think we should call it?” Leon inquires.

“What?” Tien says, putting her camera equipment back into the safety of the black bag.

“The movie,” he replies.

“The Nuances of Destruction, or Downfall.” Eirikur suggests. Ideas often come to him like zaps, with no rhyme or reason as to their origin, but he’s grown to appreciate this idiosyncrasy.

“Those both sound like war movies,” Tien points out somewhat critically.

Eirikur shrugs. “World War II certainly wasn’t a celebration,” he replies.

“I like them,” Leon says.

“Tien, which one do you like better?”

“Downfall,” she answers absolutely, and that is that.

\--------------------------

Mathias is not easily duped, and although Lukas might argue with that statement, Eirikur knows that if he is to succeed in his plan, he has to be careful. So he changes out of his water clothes before returning to their apartment. He walks in through the front door relatively confident, until he hears _both_ Lukas and Mathias talking in the cramped living room. Eirikur presses his ear to the wall, hoping that they hadn’t heard the door.

“-can’t believe he’s even trying to talk to us. You cut him out of your life for a reason,” Mathias fumes, and Eirikur can hear the pacing.

Realising immediately that they’re speaking of Lukas’s father and not of how disrespectful he is to go behind their back like that, Eirikur shouts his greeting from the foyer, “Hey!” Lukas is skilled at disguising emotion, both verbally and as it occasionally appears in the way he frowns slightly at the contortions of the turbulent seas or a vaguely impressed nod if Eirikur does especially well in something. And he looks the very definition of passive as he enters the room, Mathias still pacing.

“Mathias, stop that, you’re being annoying,” Lukas informs him flatly. In an uncharacteristic measure of obedience, Mathias takes a seat on the couch.

“What’d you do today?” Mathias asks casually, but Eirikur can sense the prodding in his voice.

“I went to the library with Leon,” he answers.

“What’d you read?”

“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Eirikur answers, and winces. It had to be a book that implied drowning in the very title that he came up with off the top of his head.

“How did it end?”

 _Why couldn’t I have picked a story I knew?_ “Well-“

“Stop interrogating him, Mattis,” Lukas says.

“I just-“

“Kjef, I don’t want to listen to your foolishness right now.” His tone lightens as he adds, “Eirikur, how is your heavy water sabotage project going?”

“Good. We just finished the script.”

They talk lightly for a few minutes, before Eirikur declares his intention to finish his homework, and retreats to his room. Pulling down the merphy bed from the wall, he sits on it carefully (he is a little concerned about the stability of the contraption), and opens up his laptop.

A message bubble pops up from his facebook account, and he opens it.

 _Leon Zhao_ : tien made a trailer for downfall with the footage shes got so far, check it out! There’s a link beside it and hesitantly Eirikur clicks on it. It’s only a little over a minute long, and by the end of it, he’s blushing terribly and clutching his pillow to his chest. His voice sounds so different from how it seemed in his head, and such outward displays of emotion on his face like the one in the 5-second clip of Kjetil trying to push Eirikur off the boat in a fit of rage, is almost alien. Flush cooling after he clicks the fan on, he exits the tab, shuts his laptop, and goes to bed.

\--------------------------

“Why did you have the fan on? It’s snowing.” Lukas wakes him suddenly by throwing his curtains open and letting the sunlight pour into every corner of the small room.

“It’s Saturday,” Eirikur grumbles from underneath his woolen blankets.

“Keen observation,” he deadpans. “I’m going to start vacuuming if you don’t get up.”

“Mean,” he mutters sleepily, reluctantly sitting halfway up and rubbing at his eyes tiredly. After a few minutes of him yawning and his brother rolling his eyes, Eirikur becomes aware enough to at least come to one simple conclusion.

“You’re not at work.”

“Wow-“

He cuts off his no doubt sarcastic remark, and asks, “Why? You always work on Saturdays.”

“My father is dying, and he made a request that I be there when he finally kicks the bucket.”

Eirikur has never met Lukas’s biological father, and Lukas has only talked of him once or twice before- when they first met and now.

“Why are you going?”

“Because I want to see the life seep out of him.” Eirikur blinks; he’s not sure if that’s supposed to be sarcastic or not. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

“Is Mathias going?”

“Mathias is indeed,” Mathias answers as he appears in the doorway.

“Just to make sure Luka doesn’t steal the liver’s thunder and kill him first.”

“Am I going?” 

“Absolutely not,” Lukas replies sharply.

“We’ll be back at 3, and I’ll call you at lunch.”

“Don’t get in any trouble,” Mathias warns.

“I won’t,” he answers.

\--------------------------

While Mathias and Lukas are gone, Eirikur and Leon film their scenes with Anri, the ones that take place inside the small boat, which they’ve tried to set up to look like a large military boat on the inside.

“Wow, Eirikur, I had no idea your Norwegian was so good!” Anri exclaims after they’ve finished shooting and are enjoying a picnic on the boat.

“My half-brother is Norwegian; he did the translations,” he informs the little group, taking a bite from his sandwich.

“Well, either way, nice job,” Anri says, affectionately batting him on the arm.

“How long have you two been dating?” Leon asks.

“We’re not dating. I have a boyfriend in my year,” she answers promptly.

“Oh,” he replies.

\--------------------------

Leon and Eirikur watch the almost-completed video that Tien sent them at Leon’s house, a rather large apartment in a wealthy area of the city. Leon props his feet up on the empty shelf above his bed. “I’ve got a Model UN conference this Saturday in Malmo.”

“Wow, that far?” 

“We’ve gone as far as Hungary before.”

Eirikur doesn’t know much about the MUN community, so he asks, “What’s your committee?” Immediately his eyes light up, and he takes his feet down from this shelf, sitting criss cross on his bed opposite of Eirikur.

“I got into the Congress of Vienna committee, I’m applying to be Metternich so we’ll have to see how that works out.”

He vaguely remembers having learnt something about Metternich in history class, maybe. The Carlsbad Decrees sound familiar.

“What about you?” Leon asks suddenly.

“Huh?”

“What do you do in freetime?”

“I play the violin,” he answers, which is true. His line of study in school is Music and Mathematics. “I spend a lot of time with my family, I guess,” he adds, and has to physically stop himself from groaning. Now he’s made himself sound dependent and homely and the type to be living in their parents’ basement in a few years after gymnasium.

“Yeah, me too,” Leon says, then pauses carefully, choosing his words precisely. “Your family should come over for dinner sometime. My parents like having guests.”

“My brother’s a trauma nurse and my-“ he pauses. He never knows what to call Mathias. Eirikur supposes that, technically, if Mathias and Lukas were married, that would make him his uncle, so he decides to go with that. “My uncle is a lawyer, so I don’t know how well the scheduling would work out.” _Let alone the fact that they’re pretty embarrassing to be with in public._

“What about your parents?” he prods.

“Don’t have any,” he replies easily.

“Ah, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to-“

“It was a long time ago.”

\--------------------------

“I don’t know what you expected to happen, Luka, but this is it! Life sucks sometimes and people that we hate die and we’re still sad!”

Eirikur can hear their conversation clearly, since he’s standing in the kitchen and they’re in the living room. Lukas and Mathias came back thirty minutes ago, but he’s pretty sure they’ve forgotten he's here, despite his relatively close location.

“I thought I would be happy,” Lukas replies quietly. “I thought I would be too, _elskede_ ,” Eirikur hears him reply, and he rolls his eyes at their sappiness. For all his protesting and denial, Lukas certainly eats it up.

“Hey. Did the liver beat Lukas to the punch after all?” Eirikur asks calmly, sitting on the lonely chair that no one sits (ever) with a glass of cola.

“Go to bed, Erik,” Lukas tells him resignedly from his position on his partner’s lap.

“Caffeine isn’t good for you this late,” Mathias calls after him, but he’s already shutting the door.

\--------------------------

“Hey Leon,” Eirikur says into his mobile phone.

“Greetings,” is the prompt reply.

“Okay, so can you quiz me on the Iliad? I hate classical studies.”

Eirikur agrees. They’re in different lines of studies, but their schedules are similar since Eirikur is in _Music and Mathematics_ and Leon is in _Mathematics,_ and they have English A, History B, and Classical Studies C together.

“Sure. What part of it?”

“All of it,” Leon answers.

“Wow. Well, have you read the book?”

“Parts of it.”

“Then you’ve got a long way to go,” Eirikur informs him, and Leon giggles.

“I can almost see my failing grade now,” he notes, but there’s not a trace of pessimism or unhappiness in his voice.

“That’s one way to look at it, I suppose,” he replies.

\--------------------------

It is February 14, and they’d been planning to film the last part of their movie today, but Leon abruptly cancels. “Sorry, it’s like a holiday and my family wants me to be at home,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“Your family wants you to be home for Valentinsdag? That’s kind of weird,” Tien notes, a bit exasperated at the loss of filming time.

“No, it’s the Lantern Festival. I’m helping my mom make the tong jyun, since basically everyone that we know is coming over to our house. If either of you want to come to the lantern part, that’s cool. It’s pretty casual in my family.”

“Could we leave afterward and film one of the night scenes?”

“The city one at the end? Sure, there are a few alleys near my house that could work.”

“So it’s settled?”

“Sure.”

\--------------------------

Eirikur knocks on the front door of Leon’s apartment building with Tien at his side, if a bit hesitantly. It’s one of those nice communities where visitors have to be buzzed in by actual residents.

“Do you think he remembered we were coming?” Tien asks, when they wait a few minutes outside with no response.“It’s cold,” she adds, and raps her knuckles against the door with enough force that Eirikur can nearly feel it in his skull, and presses the intercom buzzer. “Hello? It’s Tien Nguyen and Eirikur.” Still, no answer.

“Maybe they went out to a restaurant. It is about dinner time.”

“Should we leave and come back later?” All of the sudden, a small group of red balloons pop out from above the apartment building, glowing, and Eirikur squints at the rooftop.

“I think they’re on the roof. I’ll call him,” he volunteers. “Hi, would you mind buzzing us up?”

“Of course,” Eirikur can tell he’s covering the phone’s speakers as he faintly yells something in Chinese to an unknown family member.

“Yeah, just a sec. And, okay, you’re in. The door should be open now. Come right up, I’ll meet you in the middle.”

\--------------------------

Tien and Eirikur enter the apartment building somewhat dubiously. There’s shiny glass and stainless steal, and even a small fountain. The doorman at the desk with such a spiffy uniform makes it not unlike a hotel. “Woah, there’s an elevator with no floor! It’s glass, come look!” Tien exclaims, grabbing at his arm and pointing.

“Eh, no thanks, I’d rather take the stairs,” he replies.

“Lame,” is her quick retort, and she presses the button the elevator while the doorman looks on disapprovingly.

Eirikur finds the stairway easily enough, but he has to flick on a light to begin ascending the steps. Abruptly the lights flick off, and he freezes cautiously. He isn’t foolish enough to try getting up in the dark, so he digs into his knapsack for his mobile phone, which has a flashlight app, when a light appears at the top of the stairway.

“The stairs are on motion sensor after 6 pm. It’s annoying, huh?” Leon’s voice drifts down the staircase even though at this distance Eirikur can’t see him, just a vague silhouette, and the light. Leon quickly goes down a few flights at meets him at the floor landing above where he is. Leon is wearing a red shirt of an unusual kind, probably something traditional, and his normal school trousers. He’s swinging around a red intricate lantern from a long dowel. “We’re not allowed to release the lanterns with fires in them. It’s a hazard, apparently, so my mom’s taking the little ones to the water where they can let go theirs.”

“What about you?”

“I was fine with the balloon arrangement,” he answers. “I painted mine with glow-in-the-dark glaze.”

“Can you hold the light closer? I don’t want to trip,” Eirikur says hesitantly.

Leon extends his hand, skin reflecting the illumination of the paper lantern. He takes his hand and jumps the next few steps onto the landing. “You know,” Leon says. Eirikur releases his hand but Leon doesn’t let go. “In Hong Kong, the Lanterns Festival is like Valentines’ Day in America or like Tu Be'av in Israel.”

“Really?”

“Not in the mainland though, although it used to be.”

“Times change,” Eirikur agrees, and Leon squeezes his hand as the light guides them back up to the roof.

\--------------------------

“You didn’t break your ankle or anything on the stairs, right? Because that would be annoying for filming,” Tien says the moment she accosts them at the top of the staircase. Leon lets go of his hand, and it’s dark enough that she probably didn’t see anything.

“Well, you know I’d hate to annoy you, Tien, so I refrained from doing anything of the sort,” Eirikur replies, unable to keep the sarcasm from inching into his voice.

Leon laughs. “Don’t worry Tien, we’re all set to film the alley scene.”

“But you’re not wearing your costumes!” she exclaims.

“Let’s get dinner, then.”

“Why get dinner when we could be working?” Tien counters flatly, tossing her hair back from her shoulders and speaking louder so they can hear her over the loud cries of happy children running around with lanterns on sticks.

“C’mon, it’s Friday night. Let’s live a little.”

She sniffs disapprovingly, but eventually something akin to a smile draws across her broad lips. “Fine.”

\--------------------------

“Nice of you to finally show up,” Lukas chides from the table, a mug of tea in his hands.

Eirikur glances at his watch. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t realise it was so la-“

“Don’t worry, we had fun without you,” Mathias says as he leans backwards against the small wall dividing the living room from the kitchen. He's pulled a tall stool from near the television and is watching over a pot of cooked fruit bubbling slowly on the stove.

“Ew, I didn’t need to know that,” Eirikur remarks.

“You’re putting words into my mouth,” he replies imperturbably without looking up, getting up to stir the red concoction of fruit that he makes every year on Valentine’s Day: rødgrød med fløde. Eirikur thinks it’s kind of gross (who puts potato starch in a dessert?), but to each his own, and he's pretty sure that it holds some kind of weird significance .

“I’m going to watch television,” Eirikur informs them, and flops tiredly onto the small couch with the remote in hand.

“You don’t usually break curfew, Erik,” Lukas notes.

“There’s a first time for everything,” he answers sleepily.

\--------------------------

_Leon Zhao: Do you want to come over to my house?_

His phone buzzes on his bedside table, and he feels the table for his mobile. Blearily, he reads the time and discovers that it is 11:00 am.

_Eirikur Olvirsson: For lunch?_

_Leon Zhao: Yeah. Then we can go meet Tien to finish the movie up._

_Eirikur Olvirsson: Sounds good._

\--------------------------

“I’m going to Anri’s house to work on a project,” Eirikur tells Mathias, since Lukas is at work.

“Have fun,” he replies, barely looking up from his stack of papers as he traces the unclicked pen on the side of his neck.

_Eirikur Olvirsson: I’m leaving now. Don’t forget to get your movie clothes ready, we don’t want Tien pissed at us again._

_Leon Zhao: Yeah, but she liked having dinner with us._

Eirikur bikes to Leon’s apartment building. His flat is in the more upscale quadrant area of Copenhagen, but it’s not too far geographically, and the bike lanes are phenomenal compared to those in other cities he’s been in. It is raining, quite typical of Copenhagen at this time of year, and there’s no snow on the ground, so it’s good that they got all of their skiing scenes done already, because it would be quite difficult to film them on marshy grass.

“Hi, you must be Eirikur,” a rather small Chinese woman says answers the door. She looks vaguely familiar, and he’s pretty sure he’s seen her pick Leon up from school sometimes when the weather is too bad for him to walk. “I think I saw you briefly at the party last night.”

“Nice to meet you, Fru Zhao,” Eirikur says, extending his hand, and she shakes. She has a firm grip. He steps inside the house, and is greeted by Leon slumped in a seat at their large dining table with a long-suffering look on his face.

“I have douchi sauce and pork, can you eat that?” 

“Sure,” Eirikur replies easily. He’s not a picky eater- not with that year of Lukas cooking food on his own without any money, which usually ended up being made the cheapest meat available in the grocery store (entrails, tongue, etc.) and frozen vegetables. His brother is a surprisingly good cook, but even Mario Batali or Jamie Oliver probably wouldn’t have been able to do much better with the meagre amounts of food they purchased for that hapless year.

“So, Leon tells me you are from Iceland,” Fru Zhao says, taking a seat at the table while she slides both him and Leon bowls of the dish she prepared. It smells heavenly, and he thanks her graciously before beginning to eat.

He resists the urge to let the unhappiness show in his facial features. Talking about life before moving to Copenhagen is not exactly on his list of preferred topics. “Yes,” he says as politely as he can.

The conversation thankfully takes a turn from pasts and all of the things Eirikur does not want to talk about, and he enjoys lunch.

\--------------------------

“Sorry my mom was so annoying,” Leon says later as they’re on their way to the cousin’s boat house.

Lost in turbulent thoughts that twist and turn just like the clouds in the sky, Eirikur shakes himself. “I thought she was nice,” he says finally.

“Yeah, I guess,” he replies, shifting uncomfortably in the bus seat.

\--------------------------

“It’s finally wrap day,” Tien notes. And she’s right- it’s their last day of filming this project, and Eirikur can’t help his curiosity if the three of them will remain acquainted after all is said and done. Leon and Eirikur are already in their costumes, and the boat rocks as they review the script one last time in the minutes before filming.

“Ready?” Without waiting for a response, she continues and leaves them to scramble to their positions on the side of the boat with sheepish expressions on their characters’ faces. “1, 2, 3, Go.” Eirikur hears the click of the video camera and turns to Leon with newfound respect in his eyes.

EYAL: I’ve enjoyed working with you. [tentatively]

KJETIL: [extends his hand forward for a handshake]

EYAL: [initially backs up in surprise, then- Somehow it gets lost in the words between surprise and then, because Eirikur takes a step back like the script directs him to, putting his hands in front of him almost as if he is afraid of what Kjetil will say. The boat jumps to the side opposite of him, and Eirikur falls from the safety of the boat.

\--------------------------

Leon runs to the side of the boat to look, and that’s all he does for a second.

Look.

And scream.

Tien leaps into action, throwing her camera equipment aside and running for the rescue kit. Looping the rope, she throws it out the Eirikur. But Eirikur doesn’t catch it, because no one can catch anything when they’re unconscious. He turns limply onto his stomach, bobbing on the water like a dead body for a few seconds, before he begins to sink.

“Call for help!” Tien screams to Leon, and she tears after him: she dives into the water expertly, and swims with the life preserver circle on her shoulder. Leon empties his bag onto the deck of the small canoe-like vessel, and grabs for his phone. A large wave beats his fingers to the 1-1-2 though, and a moment later he and his phone are soaked. He tries to turn it back on but the black screen laughs at him, mocking him.

Tien and Leon somehow simultaneously understand the swirling dark clouds that they all noticed but failed to interpret the dangers of, and they both collectively realise the danger they are in.

\--------------------------

Tien fights through the increasingly torrential downpour with an unconscious Eirikur on her. The shore is too far away for her to swim all the way, and they’ve drifted a fair distance from the boat. “LEON!” she bellows, cupping her hands around her mouth. “COME HERE!” She makes a great sweeping gesture with her hand, and he seemed to understand.

Grabbing one of the forgotten paddles, he forges ahead into the storm.

\--------------------------

Lightning cracks overhead. The three of them eventually make it to shore (but not the shore they started from). It’s a rural area, and it shows in the thick forestry and overall brush.

“We have to get him to a hospital,” Tien says, with conviction, but all of her headstrong confidence will not get them cell phone signal, a working phone, or a hospital.

\--------------------------

Except it does. When Tien sets her mind to something, it usually happens. It’s nothing short of a miracle how she flags down a car on a small, barely paved road, and it’s amazing how she keeps calm, soothes Leon’s persistent verge of panic, and carries Eirikur on her back while they hike through the forest. “We need to call his family,” Leon says while they’re in the back of some stranger’s pickup truck. They’re still an hour out from the hospital he’s driving them to, and even Tien’s miracle working won’t help them if Eirikur dies in the backseat on the way there.

“His phone is waterlogged and we don’t know any of his family’s names, let alone phone numbers,” Tien replies without a trace of desperation or annoyance.

“His uncle is a lawyer, I think. We could try calling law firms in Copenhagen,” he suggests a bit frantically, gesturing to the thick phone book in the pocket behind the driver's seat.

“Can we please borrow your phone?” Leon asks the driver, a tall, wiry man with terribly accented Danish. “It is in briefcase. Under your feet,” the man replies.

\--------------------------

Four law firms later, there’s no sign of Eirikur’s uncle. It doesn’t help that they don’t know his name or even if he has the same surname as Eirikur. They take turns dialling and calling and trying to describe the situation, because it’s frankly exhausting with Eirikur’s limp body sprawled out over them and the stress surrounding the general situation. He’s still breathing, and Tien put him in the rescue position as soon as she could, but they have no idea if there is any damage, or the extent.

“Please this be a lucky six,” Leon says to no one in particular. “Hello?”

“Madsen and Vestergaard law offices, how can I help you?”

“Do you know a lawyer who has a nephew named Eirikur?” Leon asks, praying that this time will be different from all the rest.

The man laughs shortly. “Eh, Mathias and Lukas did get hitched after all? I thought Luk’d never come around,” the man says fondly.

“So you know him?” 

“Yeah, he and I went to law school together. He’s a pretty nice dude.”

“Do you have his phone number?” Leon asks hopefully.

“Why?” is the shrewd response.

“His nephew is very injured, we’re taking him to the hospital right now,” he relays as quickly as he can. “We need to tell him what’s going on.”

“Wow, I hope he's okay.” The man gives them Mathias’ cell and work numbers, both of which Tien carefully inscribes on a rather gross used napkin she finds on the floor of the truck.

They try his cell phone first. “Mathias?” Tien asks into the phone.

“Yeah, who’s asking?”

\--------------------------

“I can’t get a hold of Lukas. How far away are you from a hospital?”

“20 minutes now,” Leon says as he and Tien share the receiver.

They can both hear Mathias’s carefully controlled exhale. “Are you sure he hasn’t woken up?”

“He’s stirred a little bit, but I don’t think he is awake yet. Leon is checking his pulse and breathing frequently. We’re so sorry for causing this problem, we should have been more careful with going out to sea in bad weather.”

“As long as he is okay, I’m not going to be too upset with you,” Mathias replies with a light fake laugh, a desperate attempt to remain cheerful.

“I’m hanging up now, I’m going to call the hospital again where Lukas works.” Before they can offer their condolences or apologise again for their childish and shortsighted behaviour, he shuts off the call.

\--------------------------

The receptionist doesn’t pick up. It’s a Saturday night and the emergency room is fully booked. Mathias curses as the call goes straight to the pre-recorded message again.

\--------------------------

“Lukas, Eirikur’s been hurt. He was filming the movie thing on the lake and fell into the water.”

“I’ll be in the car in 30 seconds. Text me the address of the hospital.”

\--------------------------

Leon and Tien sit in the mini-lobby on the same floor as Eirikur’s room in silence. Leon puts his face in his hands. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he tells himself. He noticed the clouds. He vaguely remembers hearing on the morning news that they forecasted isolated thunderstorms. There were a dozen things that should have stopped him from agreeing to go out onto the boat in that kind of unpredictable weather.

And now Eirikur was lying in a hospital bed with tubes in the white flesh in the crook of his elbow, shivering under thick blankets, and a pulse monitor on his middle finger.

Hypothermia, the doctors had said.

He’d inhaled water; hit his head on the rim of the boat.

Something went very wrong between filming a short scene from their project and now, because Eirikur shouldn’t be here. None of them should be here. If Leon had just had the foresight, any foresight at all, he might have prevented this whole terrible afternoon. About an hour later, he sees two blond men enter Eirikur’s hospital room, presumably his brother and his uncle, and Tien and Leon busy themselves going downstairs to get tea from the lobby. They’re intruding on a private family moment, just by being there, let alone their involvement in Eirikur’s injuries in the first place.

“My mom is worrying, and it’s late. Do you think it’s okay if I go home?” Tien asks tentatively, holding up her watch. It’s nearly 22:30.

“Sure, I’m sure they don’t want us here.”

But Leon stays, mostly out of guilt, and drinks bad hospital tea in the downstairs lobby until midnight, intermittently texting his parents with reassurance that yes, he is fine. It’s just a shame that because of his foolishness his friend is no, not fine.

\--------------------------

Leon goes home at 2:00 am, after his parents insist on picking him up. He sits at the table with his mom while she fixes him some chamomile tea and presses him for information, making tsks of disapproval where appropriate. “His family is with him now. That is the best thing for him,” his mom says in her sloppy Cantonese.

“It’s all my fault. What am I supposed to say to him?”

“You all share blame. Don’t forget that Eirikur went out in the boat too. You didn’t force him,” his mother offers consolingly, but the disappointment in her voice and eyes is tangible.

“I expect better of you, Jīng lǐ,” his father says sternly. “I will apologise to him as soon as I can.” His mother nods. “I will call his family and let them know we will pay all medical costs.”

“Make sure you call your cousins too. You’ve probably damaged their boat and paddles,” his father adds.

“Haih, ah ba,” Leon says, and goes to bed.

\--------------------------

Eirikur spends only sixty more minutes in that hospital before Lukas takes it upon himself to get his brother transferred to a hospital that isn’t five hours away from their home in Copenhagen. He wakes up fully somewhere during the transfer, but by the time he is at the other hospital, he has regained use of most of his senses. Eirikur blearily hears Lukas talking loudly, emotionally, like he is about to crack. It’s especially distressing to witness someone usually so devoid of any emotion except for annoyance break down, but he's known it to happen. When Lukas gets really truly upset, god help the people around him. Eirikur allows his eyes to flutter open naturally of their own accord.

“I’m awake,” he mumbles.

“Mattis, våkn opp!” Lukas exclaims, jumping to his feet. He turns his back for a moment to fully collect himself, and then crowds Eirikur’s bedside. “Thank god you’re okay,” Mathias exhales.

“What happened?” Eirikur asks groggily.

Lukas snaps back into his normal mode almost instantaneously. “Well, last I recall, you lied to us over a period of several weeks and nearly drowned.”

Eirikur turns red. His brother is right- there was no excuse for acting the way that he did. “Leon and Tien are okay, right?”

“As far as I know, yes. Tien rescued you.”

“We are going to have to get her family some pretty serious gifts, since she saved your life and all,” Mathias notes light-heartedly.

“How long will I have to stay in the hospital?”

“You have a concussion and you inhaled a large quantity of water,” Lukas replies, pointedly not answering his question.

“But when am I leaving?” he presses.

“You’re lucky to be leaving at all. Your parents didn’t even make it to the hospital,” Lukas replies darkly, turning away from his partner and his charge, arms crossed tensely over his chest. Mathias winces, almost like he knew this was coming and _oh, there it is_. The bitterness, the pent up fear. Lukas lost his mother and stepdad, more of a father than his biological one ever was, the day that their parents washed up on that shore. He had to find their bodies on the shore only a mile from their home with gashes from the rocks and sunken pale flesh partially eaten by the abrasive water. The threat is very real- Eirikur could have washed up an hour later while Leon and Tien tried fruitlessly to rescue him. Lukas can almost hear them screaming Eirikur’s name as they’re unable to pull him from the water’s cajoling depths.

“Let’s just be happy that Eirikur’s okay,” Mathias says tentatively, patting him affectionately on the shoulder. Lukas seems to have something else in mind. “Mathias told me the moment he knew about your filming project. I didn’t confront you about it because I trusted you to make the right decisions, and I trusted you to remember what our parents’ deaths were like, and how important it was that history didn’t repeat itself.”

“Luk-“ Mathias pleads.

“Shut up. Eirikur,” he says seriously, standing at the foot of his cot and staring him down with a glare that could melt the ninth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno. “Do you know what it was like to get that call from Mathias? Spending five hours in my car wondering if you were going to die in a stranger’s car with two foolish kids who didn’t know any better? I hope you remember this well, because apparently your parents’ tragic deaths didn’t quite make it sink in.” Lukas leaves the room as quickly as he came in.

“I’m sure you all will work it out,” Mathias says rashly.

“At least _you’re_ optimistic,” Eirikur snorts.

“Someone has to be,” he points out. “Is it all right if I go get a coffee? I’m beat.”

“No problem,” he replies, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. He would kill to be alone right now, to try to remember every detail of what it was like in Ísland when the deaths were fresh in his eleven-year-old brain. He didn’t expect Lukas to react like that- he’d expected a talking to, certainly, but not a passionate, biting speech that cut deep into the little guilty part of him that felt he didn’t care enough that his parents had died. Lukas had certainly made it clear enough that he agreed with that statement.

“Hr. Olvirsson? I’m here to administer a breathing test,” a nurse tells him, knocking politely and stepping into the room with a clipboard. Struggling not to groan in annoyance, Eirikur sits up. He should have known better then assume Mathias was going to let him wallow in guilt for half an hour while he went out for a coffee.

\--------------------------

Eirikur leaves the hospital a bit early since one of his guardians is a registered nurse. He spends a day at home under Lukas’ silent supervision.

“I’m sorry,” Eirikur says finally while Lukas is making tea.

“Good to know. Do you want honey with your tea?”

“Sure.”

“I should have told you, I know that now,” he pleads, and Lukas leaves the kitchen under the premise of getting something from the pantry. It occurs to Eirikur that his brother just lost his biological father, and perhaps the idea of death befalling family or friends is a little too close.

\--------------------------

Back to school the very next day, Eirikur has no shortage of makeup work to complete. His violin composition needs a lot of work, and calculus class didn’t stop for his bad decisions.

“Eirikur,” Leon exclaims about ten minutes before calculus class starts, and crowds up right next to him the moment he walks in the door. The bikes lanes normally aren’t this clear, and traffic was favourable, so they both ended up getting to school much earlier than they normally do.

“Hi, it’s good to see you,” he starts, but he only gets halfway through his sentence before Leon wraps his arms around him in an enthusiastic hug.

“I’m so sorry,” Leon whispers, and releases him.

“It’s fine,” he replies quickly.

“It was my fault.”

“It was my fault too.”

“No it wasn’t. I went on the boat.”

“I went on the boat too. You fell because of something I put in the script,” Leon protests.

“But I agreed to do it. If you accept the blame, you’re denying me of my right to free choice and implying that I don’t have the ability to make decisions on my own.” That seems to stun Leon into silence. Eirikur can barely keep the smile off his face. One of his guardians is a lawyer, after all. He knows how to drive a point home. Plus, the idea of anyone except himself assuming blame pisses him off. He lied to Lukas and Mathias, went onto a boat with an imminent storm in the forecast, and nearly died.

“Where do you usually eat lunch?” Eirikur asks, as confidently as he can muster. Leon looks surprised at the question.

“Outside on the grass.”

“Me too, how come I’ve never seen you out there before?”

“Maybe we eat on opposite sides. Want to join me? I can ask Tien if she’ll come.”

“Sure, sounds good.”

Their teacher finally arrives, looking frazzled and clearly having forgotten an umbrella, and both Leon and Eirikur take their seats.

\--------------------------

No matter the weather, Eirikur and Anri always eat on the steps of the school, with Anri’s boyfriend Philip and other friends of the day. The cafeteria is always crowded and it’s nice to watch the bicycles of Copenhagen and the sounds of the city if conversation happens to fall short.

“My younger brother got a job at a ice skating rink, and he said we could discounted tickets if we go this Wednesday night,” Anri says, offering a carrot stick to Eirikur, who accepts.

“I’ve got a swimming competition that night,” her boyfriend Philip says, shaking his head.

“How about you, Eir? You free?” Anri asks him.

“Sure,” he replies.

Anri’s been his friend for as long as he can remember, and he likes doing things with her, although with the looks of the dark shadow that passes over Philip’s face, he’s going to be facing trouble soon if this keeps up. Suddenly, he is distracted by the arrival of Leon and Tien. “Hi,” he says. “Anyone want to switch madpakker?” Tien asks, holding up a rather large plastic container of what looks like noodle soup. "My mom keeps packing phở and I’m kind of sick of it.”

“Sure,” Leon says.

“I have rullepølse, do you want that?”

She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t really like meat jelly.”

“I have leverpostej and cold meat on mine,” Eirikur volunteers.

“Oh, I’ll take that. Eirikur, do you want Leon’s?”

“Definitely,” he replies as they all swap their bags and containers.

“Did Fru Laursen give you an extension for your project?” Anri asks, a bit teasingly. Eirikur rolls his eyes.

“No,” he replies sarcastically. “She failed us since I nearly drowned. Of course she did. We’re going to finish it this weekend, on land.”

“Will that work?”

Tien nods confidently. “Yes. My camera still works and we got almost all of the footage we needed from the boat anyway. We just need Leon and Eirikur to shake hands and declare their mutual respect and trust for each other, and then we’ll be done.”

“So, were your parents pissed at you?” Philip asks, a bit insensitively. Eirikur takes a big inhale so he can correct him (it takes a long time to explain usually), but Leon beats him to the punch. 

“That’s not an appropriate question.”

A brief silence falls between them.

“Well,” Anri surmises. “Did you hear that the psychology teacher is taking paternity leave for the rest of the year? I don’t know who they’ll find to replace him so late in the year.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Tien says, eager to change the subject, but the tension between Philip and the other members of the lunch group is still palpable.

\--------------------------

“Man to man, stay away from Anri,” Philip tells Eirikur between classes one day.

“We’re just friends,” Eirikur replies.

“She changed her profile picture to a picture of you two ice skating,” he hisses, like that means something.

Eirikur has to bite his lip to avoid laughing. Just last week her profile picture was a ferret. He rolls his eyes at Philip’s possessiveness and makes a mental note to kindly suggesting breaking up with him to Anri as he turns away and walks to the music room.

\--------------------------

With the music stand at his left and his iPod plugged into a speaker on top of the piano, Eirikur is the only person in the music room today. Their music teacher is very relaxed and allows them to practice anywhere in the school as long as they concentrate well enough, and so it’s not unusual for this to happen. He warms up with Fairytale, in spirit of the upcoming Eurovision in Malmö, only a few months away in May. Eirikur isn’t a vocalist like some of his fellow students in Music A, but he can sing half all right, and he hums along with the lyrics, fondly remembering watching this in 2009 with his family. He finishes the abridged version of the song, setting down his violin carefully on the piano to flick through his music notebook. He’s trying to learn a notoriously difficult violin solo piece for showcase at the end of the school year, mostly to show off.

“Wow, that was really good,” Leon says, and Eirikur jumps, then blushes profusely.

“I didn’t know you were in here,” he says, voice embarrassedly raised an octave or two.

“My supervised homework hour is a few doors down,” he explains, leaning against the piano with a faint smile ghosting his lips. As Eirikur searches through his papers for the sheet music he’s looking for.

“What can you play?”

“What do you want me to play?” Eirikur counters. He hums the last few lines of another cheesy Rybak romance song (500 Miles) before the violin solo, and plays. He’s focused on getting the timing right and still has the violin nestled in his chin, the way that novices think is uncomfortable but he’s been standing like this for nearly as long as he’s been alive, when Leon kisses him on the mouth.

Eirikur has never kissed anyone before, so he briefly panics as to what he is supposed to do with his mouth and body and violin (why is he still holding it??), and eventually decides on resting his fingers lightly on the curve of his jawline.

“Do you think if we start dating Philip will finally stop harassing me about flirting with Anri?” Eirkur asks, a bit sarcastically, and Leon cracks up.

\--------------------------

He is a little giddy as he bikes home. The snowflakes make everything brighter, and Copenhagen practically glows so somehow he expects the convivial mood to carry over when he unlocks the front door. Instead, he finds Mathias and Lukas, obviously mid-fight. The yelling stops as soon as he enters.

“Hello,” Eirikur says awkwardly in a slow voice, carefully shutting the door.

“Hey, Eirikur,” Mathias says. “How was school today?”

“I’ve got work to do,” Lukas mutters, and exits the kitchen.

For better or for worse, their apartment is so small that isolating oneself is nearly impossible, and within the hour they’re all running into each other in the kitchen as they finally decide to use the frozen pie crust they bought a month ago. It seems that all is forgiven, because Eirikur makes Lukas play his violin even though he hasn’t played since he was eighteen, and somehow he still remembers a few minutes of a solo violin adaptation of Violin Sonata No. 2 in G Major.

“I can’t believe you still remember that,” Mathais notes as he takes a sip of his beer. “That was more than ten years ago.” Eirikur gets the distinct impression that he’s referencing something that Eirikur was not present for, because Lukas didn’t even know he had a brother ten years ago.

“And Gade said it was ‘too Norwegian’,” Lukas says with a barely registrable smile, returning Eirkur’s violin with a soft smile.

“Nothing could be too Norwegian for Grieg,” Mathias answers.

“That’s by Grieg?” Eirikur asks.

“Yep,” Mathias asks. “Pretty cool composer, as far as composers go.”

“Ever heard Holberg Suite?”

\--------------------------

The final edited copy of their film is widely acclaimed among members of Fru Laursen’s history class. Tien emailed both Leon and Eirikur the final copy, so there aren’t any surprises until the end, when the screen flashes black and thick white text labels the next section as ‘bloopers’. There is only one blooper, and it’s a clip of Eirikur falling off the boat and smacking his head on the metal of the rim. The clip cuts off just after Leon begins freaking out.

There is a long, rather uncomfortable silence.

“I thought it would lighten the mood, in retrospect of what's happened,” Tien says, unapologetic and unashamed of her rather morally questionable actions.

Eirikur and Leon are the only one to dissolve into laughter at her words, but that’s probably okay because their classmates don’t know that since Eirikur owes Tien his life, and the least he can do is laugh at her bad joke, and Eirikur smiles and Leon like the lovesick teenager that he is.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so I'm Chinese but I speak Mandarin, not Cantonese, so I apologise for any translation or cultural errors. Feel free to set me straight, especially about Hong Kong. I've never been there before but I'd love to go.


End file.
